The Last Juror

The elevator on the fifth floor had been broken since Tuesday, which meant everybody else took the stairs, which meant I got to be the last one out, which meant I got to do the walk. You know the walk. Check every door handle, jiggle every latch, flick every light switch, listen to the building go quiet around you like it's swallowing.

I was twenty-three years old and I'd been doing this job for almost two years, and honestly I kind of loved the walk. Don't tell anybody.

So there I was, locking the last of the courtroom doors, when I heard somebody clear their throat behind me. I about jumped out of my uniform shirt.

"Sorry!" the woman said, hands up. "Didn't mean to sneak up on you. I was hoping you hadn't left yet."

It was Fran. Fran the public defender. I knew her name because I'd heard the other attorneys say it maybe four hundred times over the past two weeks, and also because I'd maybe looked her up once or twice. She was thirty-two, she had that tired-but-sharp look that all the good lawyers on this floor had, and she was carrying a leather briefcase that looked older than both of us put together.

"Ms. Dunn? Uh, Fran? Sorry. Everybody just kind of left. Judge declared the mistrial and dismissed everybody around three."

"Yeah, I heard. That's kind of the problem." She pointed her chin down the hall toward the elevator, whose doors were open, showing a dark, empty shaft and a yellow OUT OF ORDER sign somebody had taped up on Tuesday. "The stairs door on the landing is locked. I came out here to take a call, the stairs door clicked shut behind me, and now I can't get back down."

"Oh no!" I pulled my keys out. "That's, uh. That's not great. There's a fire exit on the east side though, let me just..."

I walked her all the way to the east stairwell, swiped my badge, pushed the bar, and the door opened about four inches and stopped. Something on the other side. Maintenance had been repainting the stairwell all week and there was a scaffolding platform sitting in front of the door on the landing below. From our side it just thudded against whatever the latch plate was doing.

"Okay," I said, staring at it. "Okay! That's fine. That's fixable. Probably."

Fran leaned against the wall with her arms crossed, watching me, and I swear she looked amused. Not mean-amused. More like she was watching a guy try to start a lawnmower.

"You said probably," she said.

"I said probably fixable, yes."

I checked my phone. No bars. Not one. The fifth floor of this building is famously a dead zone, which is why the guard desk downstairs has a landline, which is why I was suddenly feeling very dumb about leaving my radio clipped to that desk when I came up to do the lockup.

"You don't have signal either, do you," Fran said. It wasn't really a question.

I showed her the screen. She held her own phone up to the window, did that little dance where you wave it around like you're trying to flag down a plane, and then put it back in her blazer pocket.

"Great," she said. "So we're trapped. On the fifth floor of the Grantham County Courthouse. On a Friday."

"It's Thursday, actually."

"Even better. The maintenance crew won't be in until Friday morning, will they."

"Eight a.m. shift starts," I said. "Though honestly they're always late on Fridays, so call it eight thirty."

Fran laughed. It was a real laugh, not a polite one, and it kind of did something to the whole empty hallway, made it less echo-y and weird. "Eight thirty. So that's what, seventeen hours?"

"Something like that. I'm sorry. This is so not supposed to happen. There's a whole checklist for this and 'lawyer stuck on my floor' is not on it."

"Well, is there food? Water? A cot? I'm negotiable on the cot."

"Judge's chambers has a little kitchenette," I said. "Coffee machine, mini fridge, that kind of thing. And there's a bathroom. No cot. There's a couch that Judge Halvorsen naps on, but I'm not gonna lie to you, it has an energy."

"Wonderful." She picked her briefcase back up. "Lead the way, Officer..."

"Calle."

"Calle. That's a name I haven't heard before."

"My mom's from the Philippines. It's short for something longer that nobody, including me, can pronounce right."

I led her back down the hall to the judge's chambers, badge-swiped us in, and flicked on the lights. It's a nice room, honestly. Big desk, leather chairs, tall windows looking out on the parking structure, and the little kitchenette in the corner with a sink and a coffee maker that the judge treats better than he treats most attorneys.

Fran set her briefcase on the big desk, clicked it open, and started pulling things out like a magician. A bag of almonds. A protein bar. A bag of those little pepperoni sticks. A paperback novel with a cracked spine.

"Are you," I said, "planning for disasters on a regular basis? Because that bag is stocked like my grandma's pantry."

"I've been locked in places before. Courthouses, depositions, once a parking garage for six hours. You learn." She tossed me a pepperoni stick, underhand, easy. "Catch. You've earned it. You're the only man standing between me and seventeen hours of talking to a sofa."

I caught it, obviously. I'm not gonna pretend I didn't fumble it first.

She settled into one of the leather chairs across from the judge's spot, kicked her heels off under the desk like she'd done it a thousand times, and looked at me. "So. Calle the security guard. Tell me about you. What do you do when you're not jiggling door handles on the fifth floor?"

"That's the whole job description, basically. Jiggling door handles." I sat down across from her, on the visitor side, because it felt weird to sit behind the judge's desk. "Uh, I go to the community college part time. Business, sort of. I'm not sure I like it but I'm not sure I like anything, you know? And I do a lot of running. And a lot of video games. Very exciting life."

"Running where?"

"Mostly around the reservoir. There's a loop. It's like four miles."

"Four miles." She raised an eyebrow. "I get winded walking to my car. Okay. And the dating life? You're what, twenty-three? Twenty-three-year-olds are supposed to have chaotic dating lives. That's the whole deal with being twenty-three."

"Ha. Chaotic is one word for it." I rubbed my jaw. "Chaotically nothing, honestly. I've done the apps since I turned twenty-one. Dates, sure. Lots of dates. Coffees, walks, one girl who talked about her ex for two hours at a noodle place. But nothing ever, like... goes anywhere. I'm kind of famously bad at it."

"Famously? Who's saying that?"

"Everybody. My roommate. My mom. My mom asks about it every single Sunday when she calls."

Fran smiled and cracked open her protein bar. "Your mom calls every Sunday and asks about your dating life. That's actually kind of sweet. Mine sends me a link to a landscaping company's website with no explanation, once a month."

"That's... a lot more mysterious."

"It is. I've stopped asking." She pointed the protein bar at me. "Okay, but why do you think nothing goes anywhere? Bad luck? Bad picks? Or is it a you thing?"

I thought about lying. I would like to claim that I at least considered it. But it was getting dark outside the windows, the room was warm, and she'd kicked her heels off like we were going to be there a while, because we were.

"Can I be honest?" I said. "It's kind of an embarrassing thing to tell a stranger."

"Try me. I've heard confessions from actual strangers in actual courtrooms. My embarrassment bar is on the floor."

So I told her. Out loud. With words. "I've never actually, um. Done it. Sex. I've never had sex."

Fran stopped chewing her protein bar. She didn't laugh, though. That was the part I'd been bracing for since the second the sentence left my mouth, and she just... didn't.

"Okay," she said, and swallowed. "Thank you for telling me that. That took guts, and I want you to know I'm not going to make it weird."

"You're not?"

"Nope. You'd be amazed what I've heard. I once had a client confess to me that he was terrified of escalators at age forty-eight. You think a virgin twenty-three-year-old is going to register on my scale?" She brushed a crumb off her blazer. "Two years of dates and nothing went past coffee? That seems less like a you problem and more like a them problem, honestly."

"It's kind of a me problem," I admitted. "I get weird. I overthink. Like, a girl put her hand on my arm once at a trivia night and I literally stood up and said I needed to check my parking meter. I don't even drive to trivia. I walk."

Fran laughed at that. A real laugh, not a polite one, and it made me feel about ten percent less like a bug under a microscope.

"Okay, look," she said, twisting in her chair to face me fully. "I'm not going to psychoanalyze you for free, that's a different billing rate. But I'll say this. You're funny, you're easy to talk to, you caught a pepperoni stick under pressure. The problem isn't the raw material."

"You don't know that. You've known me for like an hour."

"I've known defendants for four minutes and been right about them." She shrugged. "It's a professional skill."

The light through the tall windows had gone that orange color that means the parking structure is emptying out. Which it was. I could see the last few cars pulling out, taillights flashing across the concrete, everybody else going home to their lives while I sat in a judge's chair talking about my complete failure of a love life.

"How long has it been for you?" I asked. "Since, you know. Since stuff."

"Stuff?" She grinned. "Since sex, Calle, you can say it, we're adults. Since my divorce, three years ago, there's been a couple things. Nothing serious. Last real relationship ended about two years ago. He was a good guy, wrong guy, you know how it goes."

"You date men and women?"

"Yep. Life's short. Doors are locked. Variety helps."

I laughed, and then we sat in this little quiet, which wasn't bad quiet, it was the kind where you're both thinking and neither of you minds. She got up, stretched, and wandered over to the couch, the judge's nap couch, and sat down on it, tucking one leg under her. She looked tired but sharp, like she always did, and somehow sitting on a nap couch in her stocking feet made her look even more like a person and less like a lawyer.

"Come sit," she said, patting the cushion. "You're all the way over there like I'm going to bill you for proximity."

I crossed the room and sat down on the far end of the couch, which, let's be real, was a coward's move. She noticed. Of course she noticed.

"You're sitting like the couch is going to bite you."

"It has an energy. I warned you about the energy."

"It's a couch, Calle." She scooted over, and now there was maybe a foot of leather between us instead of four feet, and my whole nervous system went on alert like I'd swallowed an alarm clock. "Better.